Mitchell Chatfield’s Reviews > These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America > Status Update

A remarkably midwit structure regarding a coal plant: ‘still, is the potential to save 150 jobs worth the plants potential to pollute the planet?’

This book tends to treat the audience like 9 year olds from a few decades ago. Even the book itself assumes that question is implied throughout the preceding sections. It’s belittling and infuriating to spell it out

Balance between workers and owners in the 1970’s USA? Really? Maybe it’s too critical for a pop audience text, but ‘balance’ doesn’t describe the literal hundreds of years of bloody and deadly struggle (cf Foner)

Just listened to a spurious claim that robber barons were not as bad for society as PE firms are; and that robber barons didn’t rely on worker exploitation. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see that’s plainly false. Cornering manoeuvres, swindling, and the thick teat of the state were their backbone - not some glamorised early-Rio-Tinto resource extraction

Currently not very far through, but the premise seems to be fundamentally liberal - the American economy would be fixed for workers if only the business owners who make jobs were doing more. I’m really not sure that the McManagement style is the solution: it plays to regressive fantasies that the golden age is somewhere back behind us